Since this is my blog and therefore my official little corner for venting, grieving, and watching my trust in modern adaptations die in real time, I want to explain why I think what is happening to HOTD, and honestly to a lot of modern adaptations and reboots in general, is so bad.
There is a difference between writing fanfiction and making an adaptation.
If I write a fanfic about Robert’s Rebellion where everyone is suddenly a My Little Pony character, that is fine. Stupid, maybe. Unhinged, absolutely. But fine, because it is fanfiction. It is openly transformative. It is not pretending to be the canon story. It exists in its own little corner, doing whatever nonsense I decided to inflict on the world that day.
An adaptation is supposed to be different. An adaptation should respect the source material. It should understand the canon, the characters, the themes, the politics, the relationships, the consequences, and the world it is adapting. Changes can happen, obviously. Some things need to be adjusted for screen. But there is a huge difference between adapting something and gutting it, wearing its skin, saying how the corpse is “creative interpretation” and fans are too dumb to understand it.
Expensive fanfiction should not be called an adaptation.
That is the fucking problem. These studios keep buying beloved worlds, stripping them down, stuffing them with their own modern fixations, ships, messaging, and half-baked ideas, then acting shocked when fans get angry. People are not mad because “nothing can ever change.” People are mad because the changes often make the story worse, flatter, dumber, and less faithful to what made the original work in the first place.
If they want to make something original, they should make something original. I would respect that more.
If HBO made a spin-off set in some corner of the ASOIAF world that George never fully explored, with original characters and new events, I would watch that. If they made a show about Asshai, the Shadow Lands, Yi Ti, Sothoryos, or some strange horror happening beyond the edges of the known map, I would be seated. Even if it was messy, I would still think, “At least they are trying to expand the world instead of rewriting something that already exists.”
That kind of thing could be creative. It could be adjacent to canon without trampling it. It could add texture to the universe instead of taking established characters and twisting them into whatever the writers personally wanted to see.
But that is not what keeps happening.
What keeps happening is that studios take stories with existing lore, existing characters, existing conflicts, and existing themes, then decide they know better than the material. And the results are idiotic.
That is why people are tired. Not because we hate adaptations. We want good adaptations. We want to see the worlds we love treated with respect. We want the people making them to understand why those stories mattered in the first place.
Instead, we keep getting bastardized canon, someone’s fetishized fever dream confessions and unresolved childhood issues.
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